Having made some of the best and some of the most successful movies in the history of film making, Steven Spielberg has nothing to prove to anyone but himself. He is the complete master of the subjects and themes, genres and styles, and I suspect even of the financing of his films. Thus I am not surprised at all to see him pick Tintin as a hero for this film made in 2011 in which he plays on the ground of movies for children while allowing his own childish self to enjoy the making and the story and experimenting with the almost unlimited possibilities offered by computerized animation.
source www.imdb.com/title/tt0983193/
There are two things that I did not like in Spielberg’s version of Tintin. One is the de-belgization of the character. Titin as a character has a Belgian flavor and although his appearance and the the one of the surrounding characters created by Herge are respectfully preserved, the rest is all but lost in translation. The second is the fact that there is too much action in this film. Yes, Spielberg is a fantastic action director, but he seems to have become at some point too much absorbed in creating action at the expense of creating emotion. Kids today already have at hand a lot of action movies, TV shows, games. If this is to be a film for kids and if parents take their precious ones to see a film by Spielberg I would expect then to experience emotion and not so much action thrills.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnl6WlEjQWQ
(video source ClevverMovies)
Otherwise The Adventures of Tintin is an amazing technical achievement and a superb visual experience. It’s almost a masterpiece in hyper-realistic cartoon making if you believe such a combination exist. I must just honor the names of the people in charge with the art – they are Andrew L. Jones and Jeff Wisniewski. I will be excused however that I expected more from the great film-maker named Steven Spielberg.
Dan,
I read almost all the Tintin books as a child and even have the stamp from Belgium but am failing to connect the dots here (maybe something was lost in translation as well in the Brazilian Portuguese version :-). But how does Spielberg “de-Belgify” Tintin in the movie? I’ve also seen the TV cartoons (albeit in English and already as an adult). Maybe some fine nuance here or there of his Euro-like (as opposed to Belgian specifically) taste for opera (but that only really manifests itself in the stories that have Castafiore as a character and if I recall correctly, the movie doesn’t really – it’s the story of the Unicorn ship which had one of Captain Haddock’s ancestors as its captain). But that’s about all I was able to detect and am not even sure that was really conveyed by Herge or more inside my own head 🙂
Now, while the advance is without doubt impressive (to make the cartoon almost become human-like and use computer animation, as a purist, I prefer the original, and I am sure if Herge were alive he would say the same thing. That is a criticism I’d have against Spielberg – how he sometimes wants to portray the stuff as he sees it instead of reality and ultimately you end up with the director’s own rendition. But we’ve seen this before w/ him (e.g. Munich vs. The Sword of Gideon).